Graphing every idea in history

Brendan Griffen created a giant network of people, using every profile on Wikipedia that had an “influenced by” or “influences” field. Each node represents a person and is sized by the number of links going in and is colored by genre.

It really is fascinating (to me at least) to start at one node and bounce along the connections to a distantly related someone else. People in philosophy influencing fantasy writers who influence comedians. It shows one thing above all: the evolution of ideas is a non-linear process. We too, are somewhere in this web, albeit at a smaller scale. We too, are the sum of many.

16 Comments

From the looks of it, it’s made with Gephi, and in the zoomable version you can see that he quite likely used a Fruchterman-Reingold layout. I love how regular this layout looks when laying down web related data (keywords, traffic sources, etc.) Beware that neat looks are one thing, Force Atlas is usually more useful since it has a strong tendency to break big connected chunks apart.

Yep you’re right! It was made with Gephi. I wanted to use some other algorithms but my little desktop couldn’t handle it. I have access to a supercomputer now so we’ll see what I can come up with in future. Stay tuned.

From the author’s site. Red – 19th/20th century philosophers, Green – antiquity & enlightenment philosophers, Pink – enlightenment authors, Yellow – 19th/20th century authors (~fiction/philosophy), Orange – fiction author, Purple – comedians. There are a few other groups like religious leaders, film directors etc, but those are the main ones.

Please read the original post. Many influential people have been left out, not just Lao-Tsu. Cave painters, the first agrarian farmers, the inventors of the wheel etc. There will never be a graph which will be accurate unless you included everyone who has ever been.